Increasing use is nowadays being made within the context of industrial production of complex software products performing special control or, as the case may be, monitoring functions within the production process. Software products of said type are likewise employed in managing and analyzing production processes. Said software products are what are termed Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). Customary MES software products include, for instance, maintenance management systems, systems for historical data management and analysis, systems for scheduling and pacing production flows, and systems for managing and tracking materials and suchlike. Increased use of said type of software products in the industrial periphery has created the need for data to be used within and between the participating MES applications on an end-to-end basis. For this purpose, what are termed integration platforms, for example a standard framework, are used by means of which the participating software applications are integrated into an overall system so that they operate using the same database. The relevant software applications are integrated by means of what are termed adapters. Since an adapter has to be embodied specifically for the respective software application being integrated, said form of application integration is associated with developing a large number of such adapters based on a standard framework of said type. Said adapters can be developed by anyone having a standard framework available. A standard framework thus constitutes an extremely potent basis for integrating software applications in the industrial periphery.
The practice to date has been for a basis of said type to be made available once only to one user, said user thereafter being able to use the functionality, namely developing adapters on the basis of the framework, an unlimited number of times. A user is consequently able to generate any number of adapters which, on being sold to third parties, yield an enormous profit for the user. However, the user only has to pay once for the item on which said profit is based, namely the standard framework. Framework manufacturers currently have to sell their product to individual users for a very high basic price in order to generate a yield commensurate with the standard framework's potential. This is disadvantageous to users when they only exploit a fraction of the standard framework's potential or, as the case may be, when they themselves do not develop any further adapters for integrating software applications with which they can generate a profit. Usage-dependent licensing is nowadays either agreed between a manufacturer and user on a contractual basis, with relevant contracts being concluded in specific, individual cases and with compliance and verification taking place on trust, or said usage-dependent licensing is based on issuing several license keys which, as applicable, can also be ordered or, as the case may be, supplied subsequently.